Is Our Nature Goodness?

Thich Nhat Hanh — Winter Retreat 2013–2014 Stillwater Meditation Hall, Upper Hamlet, Plum Village · 12 December 2013 · talk 8 of 24

Illuminates: synchronization / collective energy (the Bose–Einstein condensate, the laser) · the dualistic habit and the four “upside-down views” · the problem of evil (a good God and the tsunami) · store consciousness is indeterminate (avyākṛta) — neither wholesome nor unwholesome · the seed’s nature reworked from “determinate” to organic (flower ↔ compost; love ↔ hate) · leaking / non-leaking seeds (sāsrava/anāsrava) and the 22 faculties · nirvana as indeterminate; “happiness is ours, not nirvana.”

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[Opening: the chant of taking refuge.]

Today, in the winter retreat 2013–2014, we are in the Stillwater Meditation Hall of the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village.

Going in phase — the collective energy

Whenever we hear the sound of the bell, we stop our thinking — this becomes a habit energy — and begin to concentrate on the breathing. We breathe in gently, attentive to the in-breath, and out gently, attentive to the out-breath. It is simple, easy to do, but very important: because if everyone in the meditation hall stops thinking and breathes together, in and out, then automatically something happens. We are no longer separate individuals, but a collective, a Sangha. This is what is called synchronization — going “in phase.” We do not operate as individuals but as a community, and a new energy is generated, far more powerful than when we breathe or walk alone. This collective energy has the power to heal.

Before we chant, we ask the Sangha to breathe as one body — not many bodies — to chant as one body, and listen as one body, so that we can transcend the complexes of superiority, inferiority, and equality. When we can do that, we dissolve the individual self and go in phase, and the energy can be thousands of times stronger.

Our nervous system works like this: among its millions of cells, no single cell heads the work; they work together in synchronization, and when they come together they give rise to the mental formations — contact, attention, feeling, perception, volition. When water cools below zero, the molecules that had moved about like separate selves “go in phase” and become one block of ice — that too is synchronization. A laser is the same: a powerful beam of light made when countless photons, stimulated, go in phase and act not as separate photons but as one community — and the beam becomes so powerful it can break a kidney stone or read a CD. Science helps the photons come together as a community, and the energy is very powerful.

So when we practice, keep this in mind: when we sit together and breathe — the sound of the bell the stimulation that stops our thinking — we let go of the individual self, join the community, and enter the state of phase, and the energy of mindfulness and concentration becomes very powerful. This never happens in the supermarket. When we open the body and let the energy of mindfulness and concentration enter, healing can happen easily — and the same is true of the mind. In walking meditation, if five hundred people walk together, each concentrated on the steps, the community generates a very powerful energy, and everyone walking benefits and is healed. In Vietnam they say: as you eat rice with soup, you practice with a community.

The scientists Bose and Einstein predicted this phenomenon — when the photons go in phase, “as if all the cells are singing the same song” — and it is named the Bose–Einstein condensate. (Bose sent his article to Einstein, who found a way to publish it.) Later, three other scientists reproduced it, using stimulation to bring the photons together in phase, singing in unison rather than as separate cells — and received the Nobel Prize for it. So if we practice this way — going in phase, leaving behind the individual self, synchronizing — we generate the energy of mindfulness, concentration, and insight, very powerful, by which healing comes easily. When we come up to chant and one person reads the verse, we should really practice it, not merely go through the form: chant as one body, listen as one body, to transcend the complexes of superiority, inferiority, and equality. That is the Buddha’s teaching.

Even by ourselves we can do this — inviting all the cells of the body to go in phase through mindfulness and concentration. In the body there are cells and mental formations with conflicting needs — we want to rest, and we also want to work. If we sit, use the gathas, and breathe according to them, we invite all the cells to breathe and “chant” together, and there is synchronization within the body too — and it can heal us.

The dualistic habit, and the four upside-down views

We have the habit energy of dividing reality into two sides — one called wholesome or good, the other unwholesome or bad. We want to stand on the side of goodness, and we put God, Buddha, and nirvana on that side: enlightenment here, ignorance there; right here, wrong there; happiness, beauty, purity here — suffering, ugliness, impurity there. We want God on our side, nirvana on our side. Over there is birth and death; here, nirvana. There, impermanence — which we dislike; here, the permanence we crave, like an everlasting God. There, suffering and non-self and impurity; here, the happiness, the permanent self, and the purity we want.

In the Mahayana there is a sutra — the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sutra — that names four qualities of nirvana: permanence, happiness, self, and purity. Meanwhile, the teaching rooted in the Buddha’s own time names four “upside-down views” (viparyāsa): to take what is by nature impermanent, suffering, non-self, and impure as permanent, happy, self, and pure. So there are Mahayana sutras affirming that nirvana is permanent, blissful, self, and pure — for why would we seek a nirvana that was impermanent, suffering, and impure? — while the original teaching says clearly that reality is impermanent, that there is suffering, non-self, impurity. To go to nirvana seeking those four and leaving aside their four opposites would be dualistic.

But looking deeply: if there were no impurity, we could not see purity; if we want permanence, we have to see that there is also impermanence; if we want a self, we have to see non-self. This is mutuality, reciprocity — things wait for one another to manifest: if there is this, there is that; without the left, no right; without the top, no bottom. If there is no mud, there is no lotus; without the impurity of the mud, no purity of the lotus; without suffering, no way to look deeply into suffering and generate understanding and love — and it is understanding that makes us happy. So there is a relationship between suffering and happiness. We are naive to say we want only the lotus and not the mud, only happiness and not suffering. It is only by looking into the bad that we see the good — looking into ignorance, we see clearly why insight matters; seeing the wrong, we get an idea of the right.

When we say “God is goodness” — “my God and my goodness are the same” — and “God is love,” we bring God to the side of goodness. But then who takes care of the other side? That is not correct: if God only cares for goodness and not the other side, it cannot be that Māra reigns over that realm. It is the same dualistic error to say nirvana is permanence, happiness, self, and purity — turning away from suffering — when the ancestral teachers taught that nirvana can be found right in birth and death, and that to run from birth and death is like wanting to grow a lotus without mud.

The problem of evil

So evil is a real issue. In old China and Vietnam, the first textbook boys memorized [the Confucian Three Character Classic] begins: “At birth, human nature is originally good; we are affected for the worse only by bad company.” That is the Confucian view — that our nature is originally good.

But in the twentieth century a scholar of Manifestation-Only [name uncertain — “Đường …”], who wrote a primer in three-character verses, begins differently: originally, human nature is indeterminate — neither good nor bad (avyākṛta in Sanskrit). This is the nature of the ālaya, store consciousness — and Thay learned Manifestation-Only this way as a novice, as did the monks and nuns of the past. Why must ālaya be indeterminate? Because only what is neutral can be permeated: it is because the ālaya is neither wholesome nor unwholesome that we can plant in it the seed of goodness or of un-goodness — as tea, being neutral, can be perfumed with lotus or jasmine, or as a white cloth, being white, can be dyed red or black (whereas if it were already red, it would be hard to dye another color). So the subject of perfuming has to be neutral.

In reality, then, nature is indeterminate — neither wholesome nor unwholesome. According to Christianity, nature is the work of God’s creation; so if God is goodness, why is there badness in the world? This is a great issue for theologians. Looking into a book on nature, we can be shocked, as if there were no love in it — animals eating one another, natural disasters, suffering across the face of the earth. When a tsunami kills so many, even babies of three or four months — why does a kind and good God allow such evil? When that tsunami struck, the German theologian Hans Küng was asked, and he answered: “Only silence can answer this question.” Answering that way is as if not answering at all.

Back then I was also interviewed, and I gave an answer: when we look into reality and see non-self, we can find an answer. Life is impermanent; nature is neither good nor bad, neither love nor hate. But looking deeply, those who died are really ourselves — when they die, we die too; that baby, that old woman, that young man who died is also us dying, because we have no separate self; we are the same humanity. And the fact that we are still living means that they, too, are still living. So we have to live in a way that helps them live as well. The I Ching / Laozi [the Dao De Jing] says, in effect, “Heaven and Earth are not benevolent” — heaven and earth are neither good nor evil, and that is why such suffering is allowed; in other words, it does not find the answer either. And when Victor Hugo lost his daughter [Léopoldine], he asked the same question and wrote, suffering greatly: “I bring you, God, my heart — my heart that is crushed to pieces; and it is you who crushed it. Only you know what you do; we see only one side, while the other sinks in darkness; I do not understand why it is so.”

So suffering and natural disaster look like unfairness, like cruelty. Therefore in Buddhism we say that nature — the ālaya — is neither wholesome nor unwholesome; it is indeterminate. Goodness and evil, wholesome and unwholesome, are created by our own head, not by nature, for in nature there is neither pure nor impure. (Scientists now say the origin of the cosmos is a field of force — like the function of the seeds in Manifestation-Only: we can’t see them, but in sufficient conditions they manifest, as a matchbox holds a fire we cannot see — the flame hidden, latent, in the form of a seed. So a “seed” is not like a literal seed but a hidden potential that manifests when conditions are sufficient; the flame is the manifestation, the function is the potential — the seed. Scientists call it a force field.)

The seed’s nature: from “determinate” to organic

Recall the characteristics of a seed: (1) momentary — birth and death in the smallest unit of a second, impermanent; (2) simultaneous with its fruit; (3) continuous, changing in a series; (4) its nature — and here is the problem.

The fourth characteristic was that a seed’s nature remains the same — wholesome, unwholesome, or neutral. We used to think the ālaya holds good seeds, bad seeds, and neutral seeds (kuśala, akuśala, avyākṛta), there from beginningless time — innate seeds. But if there are innately wholesome and unwholesome seeds, then the ālaya cannot be called indeterminate. How can good or bad seeds go together with an ālaya whose nature is indeterminate — the ālaya being both the capacity that maintains and the object maintained? This is one of the great issues in Manifestation-Only: if “good is always good and bad is always bad” (a fixed, determinate nature), how can such seeds be one with an indeterminate ālaya?

In Plum Village we have an answer: we change the fourth characteristic. Instead of a fixed, determinate nature, the seed’s nature is organic. A good or bad seed has an organic nature — like a flower and compost: the flower is impermanent, so it becomes compost, and the compost is impermanent, so it becomes a flower again. It does not have a determinate nature; its nature is organic, like love and hate. At first we love so much we feel we would die without the person; but not knowing how to nourish our love, after half a year or a year our unskillfulness turns it into anger, hatred, despair. Love is organic — love becomes hate; and hate is organic too — if we know how to use it, hate can become love. Like the lotus that becomes mud, and the mud we turn back into a flower. So the wholesome or unwholesome has an organic nature — and because its nature is organic (not fixed), it can rely on the indeterminate ālaya. Otherwise we get a headache and cannot sleep over the question of how an indeterminate ālaya can contain good and bad. When a seed is wholesome we recognize it as wholesome and do not confuse it with the unwholesome — true — but wholesome and unwholesome are impermanent, organic; so if we don’t take care of them, the wholesome can become unwholesome.

So the list runs: (5) the seed waits for sufficient conditions to manifest; (6) it produces its own kind of fruit; (7) individual and collective manifestation; (8) interbeing and interpenetration — one thing is in the other. These go perfectly with the organic nature, with relying-on-other-things-to-manifest. (9) Neither new nor old — no increasing, no decreasing. (10) Neither defiled nor immaculate.

“No increasing, no decreasing”

In Manifestation-Only there is the term perfuming / habit-energy (vāsanā): thanks to perfuming, the seeds of goodness grow and the seeds of unwholesomeness weaken — the practice of watering. When we water the flower, it grows, and we feel as if things are increasing and decreasing, as if there were new things and old. But looking deeply, there is only transformation; in reality, nothing increases or decreases. In a chemical reaction, elements combine, one is “destroyed” and another “produced,” but the new and old, the increase and decrease, are only on the surface — the same number of particles remain; nothing is truly increased or decreased.

It is the same in practice: we feel the wholesome qualities and our happiness increase while suffering decreases — but the thing that decreases lets another increase, because both are impermanent. So we have to be diligent, continuous, and regular, so the wholesome qualities grow and the unwholesome are kept moderate — as farmers grow rice and greens each year because we need them, yet when we eat the grain it becomes compost again. So there is really nothing increasing or decreasing, nothing new or old; it goes in a cycle. Clouds and rain: we feel there is too much cloud or too much rain, but in the end the quantity of H₂O is the same, only transforming from one form to another. As the Heart Sutra says, things are neither defiled nor immaculate, neither increasing nor decreasing — and in quantum physics likewise, we cannot create or eliminate matter or energy (the first law of thermodynamics). So what we think of as increasing and decreasing is really not — it is only our needs that make it seem so, and because it is impermanent, we have to keep cultivating.

Leaking and non-leaking seeds — the 22 faculties

Now the great issue of purity and impurity — neither defiled nor immaculate. In Manifestation-Only, phenomena are divided into two: the leaking / with-outflows (sāsrava — impure) and the non-leaking / without-outflows (anāsrava — pure).

The leaking seeds are of three natures — wholesome, unwholesome, neutral. Unenlightened beings keep planting these three kinds of seeds in themselves and cycle through the three realms; even when there is happiness, the suffering goes on and on. For example, we donate money to cast a bell or sign a check for charity, thinking we gain merit — and we do gain merit, but this merit is from the perspective of sāsrava, leaking: it is happiness, but it leaks. Whereas if we help people who suffer without wanting any merit, that is non-leaking (anāsrava).

So in our ālaya there are leaking seeds, but also non-leaking seeds — the seeds that help us become an enlightened person, an arhat, a Buddha. And the non-leaking seed is neither wholesome, unwholesome, nor neutral [in the ordinary sense]; it is simply the pure. Here is the question: if it is purely wholesome (non-leaking), how can it go along with an ālaya whose nature is indeterminate? Is the non-leaking seed of an organic nature, or of a fixed, determined nature? This is a big issue the school needs to resolve, and the few lines offered are not strong enough to convince us.

They try to say that the non-leaking, wholesome seeds rely on the store consciousness but are not truly part of it — that they are not embraced in the ālaya, that their cause and fruit are both wholesome (so the seed is wholesome and the fruit wholesome). But this raises a problem: in Manifestation-Only we also say that the 22 faculties (indriya) are all seeds maintained in the ālaya — so how can you now say the non-leaking ones are not in the ālaya?

The 22 faculties [from the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra] are: the six sense faculties (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind); three more — the masculine and feminine faculties and the life faculty; the five feelings (suffering, happiness/pleasure, joy, anxiety/grief, equanimity); five spiritual faculties (faith, diligence, mindfulness, concentration, insight); and the last three, which are non-leaking (uncontaminated) wholesome faculties: “what I have not yet known, I will come to know” (the unmanifested); “the faculty of knowing” (what we now know); and “the faculty of having fully known.” All 22 are said to be maintained in the ālaya. So if you now say the last three (the non-leaking) are not in the ālaya, you contradict yourself.

The answer given has a name: these non-leaking seeds lean on the ālaya but are not truly indeterminate, because they lean on it — they are of the ālaya yet not really in it. And in truth, these non-leaking seeds are watered and planted — they are not innate, but acquired through practice. When we come and listen to the Buddha’s teaching, the seeds of non-leaking are planted in our store consciousness; and after hearing many times, they ripen and can transform the ālaya. So we cannot simply call them a part of the ālaya — and the school gets stuck, because we say the ālaya holds all kinds of seeds, yet the wholesome, non-leaking seeds seem to stand outside.

So this is a block in Manifestation-Only that we need to break through. The resolution is the same: its nature is neither pure nor impure — purity and impurity have an organic nature (the school’s mistake was to treat purity as fixed, unable to become impurity). We need to add a characteristic: a seed’s nature is neither pure nor impure; its purity or impurity is due to our own planting and watering. If this is not yet clear, wait until next time — Thay will explain more. It is not really difficult; it only seems complicated because we are hearing it for the first time.

What to remember: nature is indeterminate; happiness is ours

The most important thing to remember is that store consciousness is like nature: in its own nature it is indeterminate — neither pure nor impure, neither suffering nor happiness. The issues of happiness and suffering are all in our head; we rely on that and project it onto nature.

In the Buddha’s original teaching, the highest, right view transcends the notions of being and non-being — and so also transcends the ideas of wholesome and unwholesome, pure and impure. To say nirvana “is happiness” or “is not happiness,” that birth-and-death “is happiness” or “is suffering,” is to make suffering and happiness the nature of nirvana or of birth-and-death. But the truth is that nirvana is no-birth, no-death, no-being, no-non-being, no-suffering, no-happiness — like the ālaya, indeterminate.

When we come in touch with the realm of birth and death, being and non-being, suffering and happiness, we go up and down with the waves and we suffer. But when we go deep and touch the realm of no-birth and no-death, no-being and no-non-being, we transcend those pairs and calm down — and then we are happy. So happiness belongs to us; it is not part of nirvana. Riding the waves of birth and death we suffer; touching the world of no-birth and no-death, we transcend, calm down, and are at peace — and that calm, that happiness, is ours, from our capacity to touch nirvana. Our happiness comes from our practice, our way of looking — not from nirvana itself.

And so our notion of God we need to look at again. If God is on the side of goodness, then God is not the ultimate reality. The ultimate reality is no-birth, no-death, no-wholesomeness, no-unwholesomeness, no-being, no-non-being — and if we can touch it, we are at peace, transcending suffering and happiness, birth and death. This peace is ours; it is not nirvana. So we cannot say nirvana “is happiness” or “is peace”: it is our experience of peace and happiness, by coming in touch with it. This happiness comes from the capacity to touch nirvana, and is not nirvana itself — for nirvana is the very absence of this [grasped] experience. You have peace.